


no more a desolate thing

by oneinspats



Series: coveting desperate things [3]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, bad philosophy, i don't know what this is, one or two other characters are mentioned in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 15:13:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11338041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: The beginning of an understanding which includes many ruminations upon memories and language.





	no more a desolate thing

_R.M. to W.V._

> _You tell me I am ‘Individual’ which is a thought that must be rendered ridiculous. Everyone knows that the lover is reduced to a symbol, an Unreal. Nothing within a love-relationship exists except for the ‘I.’ The lover, Othered, is exotic, erotic, and confronted constantly by the ‘I’ but yet never speaks._

\--

 

Vetinari is considering language, a hardly unusual occurrence, and he is deep in hazy recollections of ancient Ankh-Morporkian and modern Klatchian and the nature of vernacular languages in their relationship with the State.

The thoughts, meandering, lazy, gentle, were brought about through a pile of old papers in a box youthfully labeled ‘H. Vetinari’ in the round script of his just-post-pubescent years. An essay to hand from a class on ancient high Klatchian responding to the statement: ‘the wrestling of national languages from the fluid variability of spoken vernacular is often seen as the beginning of a certain modernity, the end of medieval confusion.’

A recollection of Ludo saying, ‘[something, something, hazy, ill defined] and let’s be real, the guild doesn’t teach anything about Klatch or Klatchian language well. It’s all...you know. Gilded.’ Ludo laughs at his own joke.

It is easy to see it now, of course. As a sixteen-year-old he had argued that Ludo was being too sensitive and the manner in which Klatchian was taught had little impact on the real world. If Ludo were alive today he would offer an apology.

Essay still to hand, Vetinari skims and sees the words ‘creating civility’ and ‘bestowing civility’ too many times to be healthy. The essay is finally set aside to assuage the hot feeling of embarrassment.

 

There is little to be done about past-errors except to live differently in the present. Vetinari recalls a conversation with an old uncle, ninety-years-old, memory fading:

‘It’s first names now, I can’t remember them easily. I had to write yours down so I could connect with you.’

Vetinari, twenty-seven-years-old, ‘I’m sorry.’

It is the most useless of phrases. The most stupid of words. ‘I’m sorry’ is the futile vestige of a fatigue, an end, that of language itself.

His uncle had replied, ‘that serves neither me nor you. Oh, my boy, you may say it, sure, fine, you have to. We all have to. It is necessary and you’d feel incomplete without having said it and me without having heard it. But it serves neither of us.’

 

So, where does that leave Ludo as a fictive, visiting shade? Standing in a corner saying, ‘you who were with my at the ships of Brindisi,’ their old jesting name for the Guild and Vetinari replying, ‘My apologies, Ludo’ or ‘I’m sorry, Ludo’ or ‘I was sixteen and intolerably arrogant and stupid, Ludo.’

It would serve neither him nor the ghost of Ludo.

The past is heavy.

He puts the box away in a room that connects to the Oblong Office. It is tucked against a filing cabinet overflowing with day-to-day minutia of government.

 

\--

_A Klatchian poem, excerpt:_

> _From her home wander love’s uncanny away, you!_
> 
> _It is past: whose to tear memory away, you?_

\--

 

Nostalgia can border on maudlin if a person lingers in that country for too long. It is a purple month and Vetinari does not think his recent musings and mullings serve much purpose. He tracks his way out of the past. Follows rivers into the present and it is May and Vimes comes into the office with lilac pinned to his uniform.

‘Cycles, commander. I’ve been thinking of cycles.’

Vimes does not respond. They are comfortable in their habits. Vetinari allows himself to philosophize for a time before asking for the morning update. At the door Vimes says, ‘it’s only the living who haunt the dead.’

‘You very well know that is not true. There are plenty of differently alive persons on the Disc.’

Vimes doesn’t say, ‘that isn’t what I meant.’ He knows he does not have to.

The older they get the gentler they become around one another. It is amazing how the ocean of time works as sea-water upon glass, softening the edges, fading the sharpened slivers that always used to draw blood. Sybil calls it ‘graceful aging.’ Vetinari’s first thought is always: that is another way to say weakness. But his first thoughts are not always the brightest thoughts. He has matured in the twenty-odd years in office and has come to find a gentler way to be.

Who provided him that line? ‘A gentler way to be?’ Oh yes, Downey. Downey who no longer has brown hair but white. But the jaw-line he first noticed as a teenager is still there.

And really, the next item in his diary is one that is completely ridiculous but he could not help it and Vetinari wonders if, perhaps, it is time to call it all in. Give someone else a chance to compose a fraught harmony out of the discord of the city. Things can _always_ be helped.

Downey is on time, of course.

‘Is the city about to collapse?’ He asks upon entering. Coat is damp from early morning spring rain and he drapes it upon a chair. The wool is a beautiful black. Downey relishes finely appointed rooms, beautiful clothes, decadent food. ‘Because that’s all I can think of--’

Vetinari looks to Downey then down to the crate which he has reappeared from the filing room. Realization for reason of summons is Downey’s eyebrows lifting half a fraction.

‘Bursar was doing a spot of spring cleaning at the Guild. She found mine as well. Did you know I actually circled X on an exam and wrote “found it” next to it?’ Downey lounges in his chair and looks like he is a natural feature of the office. ‘I imagine yours are all pristine. I didn’t look, by the way.’

‘I know.’

‘I also found an exam where I drew an anatomically correct frog in answer to an essay question on Genuan Absurdism. I believe I thought I was being clever.’

‘However did you graduate.’

‘That is a mystery for historians. But I do believe I managed to get over myself at some point.’

Vetinari appreciates this and so acknowledges it with a small nod. Downey of fifty-five is a different animal entirely from Downey of eighteen.

‘My father threatening to toss me out of the house helped enormously.’

‘Is that why you summered at the Guild that one year? I don’t recall asking.’

‘Might have been. It could have been anything, really. I was a bit of an idiot at that time.’

Vetinari nods slowly. Fathers are always a difficult subject, he has found, for those who had them. He motions to the box and says that he will send a clerk over to the Guild to collect any other odds and ends from his academic career if Downey does not mind. Downey does not say if he minds or not but Vetinari does not care.

‘Have you gone through the entire box?’ Downey asks. He is still lounging and Vetinari wonders if he has allowed too much familiarity to pass in recent years.

‘Not yet.’

There is no follow up question and so Vetinari does his habitual gathering of papers and says, as he returns his attention to them, ‘do not let me detain you.’

Downey watches him for a long moment then leaves. He might have snorted.

The box is returned to the filing room then pulled back out. He lifts up more papers. There is a copy of the Guild student rag with an article he wrote. An unusually small yearbook from his graduate program year. Snapcase had thinned the numbers by then, he just had not recalled it being that quickly.

Downey had once asked him what future historians would write about Snapcase’s time and he had said ‘not much’ for his predecessor had not been keen on leaving a paper trail and no one who lived through that time is going to write about it.

His picture is at the back. He flips and finds Ludo’s then Downey’s. They are all so young. They wear evident arrogance across their features save for Ludo who was more astute at an early age.

The yearbook is put back with the other papers.

The box returned the filing room.

 

\--

 _R.M. to W.V._  

> _I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my latest plans occur to me like so many dice cast. I am a conqueror crossing a river. I am a dictator rending open the wound made by my predecessor). My enterprise is stranded, washed up on shore a shipwreck and so I emerge from it tragic. I am tragic._
> 
> _(Someone tells me: our kind of love is not viable. But how can you_ evaluate _viability? What standards do you apply to it that will let you render it one way or another? Why is it better to_ last _than to_ burn _? Do not answer that, I am being facetious. I understand the importance of longevity.)_
> 
> _I write you this, ill advisedly. You are someone I will never be and I am someone you have created in your mind and have put in pretty, purple dresses and situated in drawing rooms. You will be dead one day. We are tragic. Tragedy is really, when something like love ends in neither defeat nor victory but perfect, utter, disgusting_ indifference _._

\--

 

A week passes and Vetinari finds himself summoning Downey to discuss taxes. He tells himself that some things are best discussed in person and yes, he could have sent a clerk to remind the assassin what is owed to the city, but this is better. They have a history, after all.

Downey arrives and immediately denies that the Assassins Guild has ever shirked on paying taxes.

Vetinari, ‘you once told me, and I will quote you verbatim--’

‘There’s no need--'

‘ _Verbatim,_ you said, “At school you were always the boy with words. A quick wit. I remember a teacher of ours saying while we were both smart you were quicker and that ate me up” then later I pointed out that you were the one who favoured maths.’

Downey heaves a sigh. Vetinari goes on to explain that he knows what Downey can do with an accounts book and that he has an army of clerks who can find out, to the exact decimal point, what Downey has done with money owed.

‘The city has been fine,’ Downey says in some semblance of protest. He pauses. Vetinari watches the man think about something for a long a moment then a light appears behind black eyes and Downey says, ‘so how long has Vetinari family money been bankrolling Ankh-Morpork? I hope your interest rates are gentle, for the sake of the city.’

‘The family bank’s interest rates are reasonable and tied to inflation on so long as inflation rests around 2 per cent.’ Vetinari collects the tax analysis up. He is surprised it has taken Downey so long to work out the financing of Ankh-Morpork. But then, he reasons, I have never given him cause to think much on it. ‘Get me the guild’s taxes and everything will be as I am sure both of us want it to be.’

Downey unfurls himself from the chair. Being a tall man the process of slowly standing is akin to a long sigh.

‘You’re a cruel man, you know,’ Downey says. ‘Actually, I take that back. You’re not cruel at all.’

Vetinari leans back and looks up at Downey who is putting his hat back on. Downey seems pleased with himself which Vetinari finds suspicious. Perhaps it is the realization that he is not cruel, merely necessary. Vetinari had always assumed Downey knew that. Of everyone in the city surely _Downey_ knew that.

‘I have,’ Downey says.

‘Pardon?’

‘Always known. Only, it seemed the thing to say at the moment then it wasn’t. Anyway, ta. I’ll have Bursar do something to find this money that I’m sure we already paid.’

Downey’s eyes shift around the room, the World’s Best Boss mug, a collection of books on infrastructure, stacks of government papers. He touches the brim of his hat, ‘until next time.’ As he leaves he produces an apple from his pocket and takes a bite.

The room smells like the beginning of summer. It is lilacs and jasmine and winter garbage defrosting. It is sweet and sour and humid but still cool. Vetinari recalls being seventeen, a year after the failed revolution, and plucking a trampled lilac from the street. He had pressed it between pages of an old journal and hid it beneath his mattress.

The past is heavy.

At that time he would see the ghost of Keel on street corners, smell cigar smoke in fleeting moments of quiet memory, and would carve angels into bathroom stall doors at the Guild.

 

\--

 _A Klatchian poem, excerpt:_  

> _Beloved, what is it you run for?_
> 
> _You write, ‘I want you,’_
> 
>  
> 
> _we must make it so there is no more a desolate thing._
> 
> _You write, ‘I want you,’_
> 
>  
> 
> _as if wanting is a desolate matter._

\--

 

A memory:

(these sort always come around three in the morning in late May because Snapcase, for all his madness, had the genius of understanding the performance of naked power. May. May. May.)

Vetinari is nineteen, twenty and this is the first time Snapcase has taken a public hit at the Assassins. It comes as a shock. Even to him who knew what to expect because he read history books, was raised by Madam, and has a generally pragmatic approach to his finely tuned worldview.

He and Downey are snapping at each other in a cafe arguing over who does what research on a graduate course project. Downey is waving Vetinari’s notes in his face and saying that they are stupid and make no sense and go in circles.

This is a clear image in Vetinari’s mind: Downey’s face curled as he snarls, ‘You just think you’re smart because you’re good with words. That doesn’t mean anything.’

And then he, Vetinari, replying, ‘the word you were looking for is “recursive” and no, my argument in the second section is not recursive. It is technical.’

Vetinari, present day, always reminds himself: he was right, it was recursive.

Downey, ‘It’s idiotic.’

‘Where,’ Vetinari pushes the pile of papers over. ‘Show me where. Show me where I’m being idiotic.’

Downey scowls and prowls through the research. They are towards the front of the cafe and being studiously ignored by the rest of the occupants. Downey is in shirtsleeves and they are rolled up to his elbows. Summer has descended early upon Ankh-Morpork in full, brutal force. Everything smells of human. It is inescapable.

Downey is glaring at the papers. Vetinari is glaring at Downey. Although less of a bully when one-on-one when his grades depend on some form of cooperation, Vetinari, at this point, cannot find Downey to be pleasant company.

‘I’ll find it later. It’s too hot to think.’

Vetinari is about to make a quip that Downey rarely thinks regardless of the state of the weather when a clatter of noise from the street draws their attention outward, away from each other. A cart rolls up to the end of the street and a man wearing the Patrician’s colours descends. Flies hang thick above the cart’s load.

Vetinari remembers that sinking feeling he had when he saw the cart. That knowing without seeing becomes a feeling of curdling in the base of the stomach.

The man in the Patrician’s colours unfurls a proclamation and begins to read. It is the usual line about Ankh-Morpork being the chosen city of the Gods and how a New City will be Born Again From The Ashes Of The Old and more pronouncements about exceptionalism and duty and moral behaviour expected of citizens.

When the first body is hoisted up to be displayed Vetinari recognizes the young man and finds himself shocked. He is then shocked by his shock.

Another part of his mind is saying, You’ve seen dead bodies before. You’re an assassin. What would Madam think? He becomes divided about what Madam would think. It multiplies from there. His thoughts are fractals.

Downey is right, the mad thought occurs to him. It is too hot to think.

‘That’s Tomlin,’ Downey says. He repeats stupidly, ‘that’s Tomlin.’

‘We should go,’ Vetinari says.

‘That’s Tomlin.’

Tomlin’s face is the ugly, distorted face of a hanged man. There are stains on his trousers from his bowels doing their duty at the end of life. Flies settle back upon him covering his features. His face becomes a black, moving mass.

Vetinari grabs Downey’s arm as another body is hoisted up and snarls, ‘come on you great oaf.’ He does not want to see the next one’s face.

‘Oi,’ a sneering, cold look. There is wilderness within Downey’s eyes. Vetinari wonders that he has never noticed it before. They are black, like northern forests. ‘I’m not as stupid as you think I am.’

‘Probably. Now come on.’

They scoot down alley ways and over rooftops to the Guild. The humidity clings to them, a second layer of clothes, a sheet of wet and hot armour. Vetinari wants to scrub his body clean. He imagines the bath he is going to take all the way back to the Guild but once inside he becomes disgusted with his reaction.

‘We neither should be shocked,’ Vetinari says. Downey is busy drinking a whiskey. ‘I’m shocked that we are shocked.’

‘Different when it’s a kid playing footy with a man’s head because he’s a murderer.’

‘Is it?’

Downey nods. He does not explain how it is different. Vetinari holds out his hand and Downey passes him a glass. They drink and watch the shadows of the evening grow long.

 

The next bit Vetinari is not sure when it happened. If it was the night Tomlin was strung up or later, the next day or the next or the next. Regardless, enter the twilight of early morning and Downey is knocking on his door. Vetinari opens it and is too tired to ask what the other man wants.

‘It’s about states,’ Downey explains. ‘That’s what makes this different. States don’t always execute for treason. Genua exiles. So does Pseudopolis. We did for a while. It’s about states.’

‘Sure, Downey.’

‘That’s why it’s different than beheading a man for murder.’

‘Downey.’

‘What?’

‘Go to sleep.’

Downey becomes aware of himself and that it is gone four in the morning and they are both in pajamas and the Guild is mostly empty save for skeleton staff to keep things running.

‘I just wanted to tell you before I forgot.’

Vetinari says, ‘thanks. But maybe we’ll leave personal lived experiences of states performing sovereignty out of the paper.’

‘What’d that have to do with translation anyway?’

‘Right, nothing.’

Vetinari closes the door but now that he is awake he knows he will not be able to sleep again. He outlines the relationship between translating sovereignty from symbol to action and thinks there are many ways he could incorporate this into the paper but he doesn’t feel like dying so won’t tempt fate.

Things slip away - secrets escaping through fingers, whispers in the quiet slip through the streets and fall into the hands of Snapcase’s secretary.

As the sun unfolds over the city Vetinari burns his outline.

He thinks it might be time for a holiday.

 

Madam had once said that trauma never leaves the body. It embeds itself in the marrow of bones. The flesh recalls when the mind is unwilling. In the same way cities and states remember trauma in the streets and stones of houses built from ruins of former glory. Vetinari knows he has spent his life translating some good from the ill of those post-Winder days.

In that area of life, at least, he has no regrets.

 

\--

 

> _Askesis (the impulse toward askesis) is addressed to the other: turn back and see me, know me, look at what you made of me._
> 
> _It is a blackmail: I will leave if you do not look._

\--

 

Ankh Morpork rocks and shifts against itself in summer months. Last year there was almost civil war or, at the very least, riots. Things were almost quite bad. Since then the relationship between all species involved has settled and government appropriation of certain Devices has gone as smoothly as one might expect.

Vetinari receives petitions about it but has decided that city need triumphs over individual cultural rights to an object. Vimes disagrees with him on this but is stalwart and says little. The commander kicks up a fuss and slows down production when it suits him. Vetinari is patient about it.

Summer brings out Downey’s rarely-witnessed melancholic side. He is quiet at council meetings and only half-heartedly pits Vimes and Rust against each other for the sake of amusement.  Indeed, on this day, he didn’t even try. Vimes is evidently aware of Downey’s game and is cautiously pleased with the change. Rust is half-senile and soon to be replaced with his son and so unaware. Or, presents as unaware. Vetinari is uncertain.

The infirm and the mad - those born in such a way, driven to such a state, or age into it - have their moments of heart wrenching, startling clarity.

‘If I ever end up as Lord Rust you have permission to inhume me,’ Downey says to Vetinari. ‘Provided you’re still alive. It’s in my will.’

They drift through hallways which have some breeze from the open windows. The higher up you go in Ankh-Morpork the better the air, the more evident the draught.

Vetinari thinks that this is a profound statement about something regarding them both and would like to turn it over but this is not the time. Downey is melancholic.

‘The students are gone for summer holidays,’ Vetinari states.

‘Yes.’

‘The graduation ceremony was charming as usual.’

‘Only one inhumation. I was a bit disappointed. I had a bet going with the Bursar that there would be at least three this year. No one in the graduating class liked each other.’

In the Oblong Office Downey remains standing instead of his usual approach to lounging like a large, uninvited dog.

‘Next year,’ Vetinari says with something approaching cheerfulness.

‘Hopefully. The students were talking about having a reunion.’

Vetinari waits. He has ordered coffee for himself and hopes the single cup will be a hint that he has played his role of long-time-colleague and Downey will drift off to contemplate the past elsewhere. Vetinari cannot think over strange offers of end-of-life inhumation with Downey present.

‘Students do talk about such things at this time,’ Vetinari offers.  

‘Yes. Were we to have one it’d be quite small.

‘Our profession is not a long-lived one. And age thins numbers.’

‘That is not what I meant.’

No, Vetinari thinks, I know that is not what you meant. We have had this conversation before. Every year, in fact.

They rest in a quiet mode as each contemplates the unspoken memory or, perhaps, waits for the other to do the unthinkable by saying it out loud. Vetinari feels that revisiting the summers of Snapcase is an act of despair and a person can become carried away by the tide. The pain of some memories can asphyxiate. The mind stiffens, convulses, trembles, and then must abandon the subject for its own sake.

He realizes he has never seen Downey express more than this melancholic bittersweetness about those summers. He has a suspicion there continue to be deep wells to the man. There always have been, even when he was a child and a bully.

Which, in Vetinari’s experience, makes Downey an oddity. Most bullies lack depth. They are as you see them. This is not to say they are not in pain themselves as many are, though not all, but pain being relegated to abusive behaviour does not negate shallowness of character.

But, then, Downey grew up. Or, as he so charmingly put it, ‘got over himself.’

Vetinari recalls his own self during those years and thinks he, too, was a bit of an arrogant prat and probably decidedly unlikeable to most people.

Thank the gods for personal growth.

Downey does drift out halfway through Vetinari’s coffee and says that he will see him later in the week for the Guild’s board and trustee meeting.

‘Downey.’

It floats and taps Downey on the shoulder.

‘Hm?’

‘Are you free after the board meeting?’

‘Mostly. I have last minute grading from some of the summer students then I have a job but that can be pushed back.’

Vetinari inspects the report in front of him. It is a report on the cost-benefit analysis of repaving parts of the city. He thinks he will need to price it out because he is wary of the bias he can already sense. It oozes off the paper.

‘Dinner?’ Vetinari suggests.

‘If you’d like.’

‘Fine. You decide where.’

Downey makes a noise that means ‘sure’ and leaves. Vetinari continues reading the cost-benefit analysis of the repaving plan and wonders where half the numbers are coming from because surely it cannot be this expensive to re-pave only part of the city. He turns the page, oh he found them. He thinks that perhaps should have suggested somewhere, perhaps a Klatchian restaurant for old times-sake.

I am becoming nostalgic, he thinks. His lip curls at the thought. This won’t do.

After lunch Vetinari pulls out the old box of his school work and finds some half-completed thoughts. Scribbles of paragraphs, outlines. One is a quote from his ninety-year-old uncle, ‘there are some people who, when they die, leave behind more scar tissue than others.’ Another, a line from something that he cannot remember, ‘to speak of illness is to linguistically recreate the act of contagion.’

Enough. The papers are put back and the box relocated to its home in the filing room. Why was twenty-something Havelock writing about language and illness? Because, he answers himself, twenty-something Havelock was always writing about language and _something._ It is only, perhaps, a quarter of his ideas were worth salt. The rest, flotsam.

 

\--

_R.M. to W.V._

> _Darling, you write to me that you are suffering without me. Without your Other and I find it charming. You are so affective and controlled, very amorous and very civilized. You are being delicate. Lover, do not be compassionate. I am Atiam, Genuan goddess of madness. It is me who should be delicate. My fingers are winged, they touch but lightly._
> 
> _You ask me, what do I think of love? I cannot think of love. I think nothing of love because I am inside of it and I am its existence and so cannot see its essence. Love does not allow one to think properly. It is like a hot summer’s day. Entirely distracting._

\--

 

Between the council meeting and the Guild trustee meeting is four days of Downey pestering him about the tax issue.

He shows up at nine in the morning. ‘I knew you’d be up,’ is Downey’s excuse. ‘And no one else will have gotten here yet. Do you want me to have someone fix your clock?’

This is a question he has asked at least once a year since Vetinari became patrician. Vetinari wonders if he adores it or not. There is a tentative thing-ness here that he is not yet certain of. Perhaps he should not let thoughts with words like ‘adore’ fester too long.

Downey is being very civilized in his complaints about Ankh-Morpork’s tax system. He says, ‘someone should fix it.’ Vetinari looks at him. Downey grins. It is pleasant, Vetinari thinks, to see that the melancholy of the other day has passed.

It is graduation ceremonies, they remind one of age.

One day Downey comes at four in the afternoon and places a box on the desk. Vetinari stares at it expectantly. Downey huffs, turns it around, and opens it.

‘Give me some credit, I wouldn’t try and inhume you with the dart-in-box trick. It’s too obvious. I brought tea.’

It is Da Hong Pao. The most expensive tea on the Disc. This box easily costs more than the Guild’s owed back-taxes which is possibly where they went to.

Downey is smug. Vetinari carefully closes the lid to the box and asks, ‘is this where the money you owe the city has gone?’

‘No.’

‘I won’t drink Ankh-Morpork’s tax money. There will be too much ammunition for DeWorde’s horrid cartoonists if that were to occur.’

‘I would never --’

‘Yes you would.’

Downey shrugs. Sure, he seems to say, possibly.

The box sits innocently on the desk. Vetinari wonders if this is a bribe. Bribing is very Downey but he cannot think what it is for beyond the oft’ discussed back-taxes.

‘Fine,’ Vetinari says. ‘We will have some since you have procured it. Do I want to know how?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not.’

‘And if the Commander asks, I wasn’t here.’

Vetinari looks up at the ceiling for a long moment then back. He says, ‘I’m glad you’ve recovered.’

‘Recovered?’

Vetinari does not answer. He rings for tea service.

 

\--

_An excerpt from a poem by an anonymous Uberwaldian writer:_

> _Last year’s fruit is eaten,_
> 
> _and last year’s words belong to last year’s language_
> 
> _and next year’s words await another voice._

\--

  


A memory:

Summer. Before Vetinari’s Tour, sneeringly called the Grand Sneer, and he and Downey are on the Guild’s rooftop. Downey is smoking a hand-rolled fag and occasionally picking tobacco off his tongue. He flicks it into the gutter. When the smoke is finished he fishes a flask out of his pocket and shakes it.

‘Pocket full of gin,’ he says. Vetinari rolls his eyes. ‘Drink?’

They share the flask. Vetinari thinks that it is because of these strange, gauze-like memories of summer with Downey he will always associate heat with distilled pine trees.

Descending when the drink is done Downey says he has some work to do for a job and Vetinari, bored, follows Downey to the lab. He explains the history of the poppy flower in Klatch as Downey preps the flower’s latex to be dried and turned into opium.

Putting away the equipment it is past midnight and Downey quotes, ‘I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, you see, deary and I fit-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I take my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fill it, deary. Ah, my poor nerves.’

Vetinari, startled, says, ‘I didn’t think you’d have read that book.’

Downey shrugs. Putting out the candles with thumb and forefinger he says, ‘it’s all right. A bit heavy handed on how evil certain vices are though. And I like a good mystery though this one was never finished which is rum.'

‘Yes,’ Vetinari replies. ‘I suppose it is.’

 

\--

_From an unfinished book by an Ankh-Morkporkian author:_

> _As I was listening, there in the distance a door banged. Open closed. Bang. As I was listening at a distance I could only hear the distance. My ears they pulsed. My body it trembled. Both increased as the longer I waited. This brings us, again, you said, to the vexed question whether desires are internal or more like foreign countries._

\--

 

In the bottom of the box from his school days Vetinari finds a letter to himself. It has yellowed with age and smeared in places but he recognizes the handwriting as his own. He reads it. He sighs. He reads it again. It is funny, he muses, how things work out. Or don’t, as the case may be. Though gods know there is time yet, but is there willingness?

He had spoken of cycles with Vimes a month or so ago and yes, of course he had been thinking of Keel and the revolution and the dead of that day. He always does on the 25th but he had also been thinking of other things.

A line from the letter, ‘in another timeline to our lives, or perhaps at a later date within this one’ and it goes on becoming recursive by the end. He smiles. Circles, recursivity, cycles of time - time, after all, being a conch-shell. He is aware that the imagery is shaky at best. He likes progress but understands that certain things round back on themselves.

The letter to himself was a practice letter that he was going to send to Downey at some point between his returning from the Tour and ascending to the Patricianship. There is no date and a large gap of years between those two things.

Uncertainty is a foreign country. He prefers others to reside in it, not himself. He isn’t even sure if there is anything happening with them outside of his own assumptions about their current amiableness.  

The letter ends up in the fire.

 

\--

_An ancient Agatean philosopher once wrote:_

> _There is a contradiction I cannot escape: I am in love and believe that I know the Other better than anyone and triumphantly assert this to the Other; yet, at the same time, I am often shocked by the obvious fact that I know nothing about the Other. I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me._
> 
> _I wear myself out, I shall never know._

_\--_

 

Dinner is at a Klatchian restaurant because they have known each other since they were nine and eleven, respectively and Downey understands some things better than Vetinari expects him to. Which is Vetinari’s fault, he knows, for not always giving the man proper credit.

Afterwards they end up on the Guild rooftop.

Vetinari has had time to dissect the statement from earlier in the week and still remains uncertain. He wonders if he is reading too much into it. Downey is Downey.

And, as Downey is Downey, he pulls out a hand-rolled fag and leans back against one of the chimneys. ‘Smoke?’

Vetinari gives him a look. Downey grins and lights a match.

‘The other day,’ Vetinari says. ‘Does your will actually have a clause about age and senility?’

‘Of course.’

‘Fine. I suppose I consider myself honoured.’

Downey blows out smoke. ‘It’s funny how things work out.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, when we were younger you wouldn’t have thought we’d eventually get on. I was always throwing things at you, calling you names, being a boar.’

‘Oh yes. But we were children.’

Downey shrugs, shifts his weight and pulls out a flask. ‘Gin?’

‘Do you always have gin on you?’ Vetinari knows the answer.

‘Yes.’ Downey passes it over. He seems to want to ask something but cannot, or will not. Vetinari waits. It is helpful, at times, to have the patience of a rock. Finally the question is asked with a very straight face, a very affected straight face, ‘your mother.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your mother is madam, isn’t she?’

Vetinari is not sure how or when or by what manner Downey has pieced this particular jigsaw together. Vetinari is a meticulous man and meticulous in family secrecy. He gives the usual line of madam being his aunt. Downey peers at him with those wilderness black eyes only they are milder now, than when they were younger, gentler. Vetinari breaths out, desperately aware of their proximity to one another.

‘Sure,’ Downey says. He is pleased with himself and snubs out the cigarette.

Vetinari gives him this much, ‘I once found a cache of letters from my mother to my father. This must have been twenty, twenty-five years ago. I remember one saying something like “our love is not viable. But how does one evaluate viability? What standards do you apply to it? Why is it better to last than to burn?” she said not answer that as she was being facetious.'

‘So, that’s where you get your word thing from, then.’

‘Yes,’ dry, ‘that’s where I get my word thing from.’

Downey takes back the flask. Vetinari asks what job it is he had to push back in order to fit in dinner and Downey gives the usual evasive reply of an assassin. ‘It won’t be a difficult job, though. I think that’s why I prefer teaching. It’s more of a challenge than inhuming people.’

Vetinari thinks this a profound statement. He cannot bring himself to say as much.

 

\--

_R.M. to W.V._

> _All I want is to understand, to analyse, to know and express in another language than mine. Through another language I can represent myself to myself. I can understand my own madness, then. To understand is to undo the image, it is to divide, to render the ‘I’ no more. I want you to take me with you but I also no longer wish to interpret. We are at an impasse._

\--

  


Madam had been a different person when those letters were written. A week has passed since dinner and he has found them buried in a file in an unused wing of the palace. These are things that ought to be burnt. They contain too much to be allowed existence.

He dislikes that he is growing sentimental with age, whatever Sybil says about sentimentality and gentleness being a gift that comes with growing old. Sybil, he thinks, is too good for us all.

He reads through the letters and wonders at the shift from this private woman to the one he knew growing up. He had heard that his father was a very different man than him, more light hearted, joy-filled, and given to laughter. From whom did he inherit the serious nature? The secretiveness? The quiet surety? He had always assumed his mother but then she writes things like, ‘it is my desire that I desire and I rejoice that you and I both desire desire’ and ‘You ask me, what do I think of love? I cannot think of love. I think nothing of love because I am inside of it and I am its existence and so cannot see its essence.’

But, there is also her writing, ‘truth can be delayed but cannot be denied. It is irreducible. To be in the truth is cause enough to persist even if what you do with the truth is acknowledge it then bury it’ which is much more the woman he knows.

It is ridiculous, but he cannot imagine his mother young and in love. The thought goes against everything he ever knew about her and speaks to this other creature that merely looked like her, wore her dresses, possessed her handwriting but these two people: the cynical sex worker and the woman in love were one and the same and he admires that, even if it does jar childhood memories.

The letters are tucked away. He will admit that it is nice to know that one was conceived in something like love even if it doesn’t change anything.

Returning to his office he rings for Drumknott.

‘Sir?’

‘What is the best gin on the Disc?’

‘I can find out, sir.’

‘Good. I would like one bottle of it.’

The evening edition of the _Ankh-Morpork Times_ is on his desk and he skims the headlines.

 

\--

 _An Ankh-Morkporkian writer:_  

> _Example of obscenity: every time the word ‘love’ is used. Love’s sentimentality is transgressive and leaves one alone, exposed. It is this sentimentality that constitutes love’s obscenity. Love ensures our nakedness._

\--

 

It is evident that Downey is surprised when Vetinari is shown into his office. Eyebrows go up and one of Downey’s dogs makes a soft woofing noise of a disturbed animal. It raises it’s large head and blinks lazily at Vetinari then returns to sleep.

‘I have come to return your gift.’ Vetinari seats himself and Downey’s face becomes one of objection. ‘I brought you this.’ The bottle of gin is placed on the desk.

Downey, evidently delighted, says, ‘is this how my hard earned tax dollars are being spent? On gifts to city officials?’

Vetinari's sliver smile. ‘This is your fault, Downey.’

Two glasses are pulled out and Downey happily pours them both some.

‘I’ve never managed to get this one. All these Agatean businessmen buy it up, you know. Disappears over to the counterweight continent never to be seen again.’

Vetinari does not have the heart to say that he cannot tell the difference between gins besides what is good and what is bad. He is more of a brandy person.

‘How is summer course work going? Are the students behaving themselves?’

‘Tolerably. One tried to inhume the Commander today and came back with carnivorous fish wounds. I am astounded every time. He has a twisted genius, that man. I say this with full respect.’

They take a tour through the day’s happenings and at one point a student barges in saying something about another student attempting to inhume him in the showers even though that’s against Guild rules then stops. Says, ‘ohmygods I am so sorry sir,’ and flees from the room.

Downey, idly, ‘please, come around more often and instill the fear of the gods into my students.’

Vetinari closes the door, ‘I wasn’t aware my mere presence is so terrifying.’

‘Tosh, of course you’re aware.’

Vetinari admires Downey’s clear affection for his students. He considers this a pleasant modernization from their time at the Guild where, in the presence of the Master of the guild, students were neither seen nor heard except during Hall.

‘Tell me in what ways is teaching more challenging than inhumation,’ he asks.

Downey, enthusiastic on the topic, expounds for days.

When Vetinari leaves Downey walks him to the door, looks at him with some meaning and says, ‘ta for the gin’ and Vetinari says that it was no matter and he leaves and the air is tangible. He believes this is why people used to think the air made of ether. Sometimes, it is almost as if you can touch it.

 

\--

 _From the memoirs of a Genuan noblewoman:_  

> _Another day, in the rain, we’re waiting for the boat at the lake. I look over and see you beside me as you have always been, though we were not always so amiable. I feel a sudden rush, a tumult, I am dissolved. I fall, flow, melt. Yet, I am calm, placid, content. This happiness both engulfs me and soothes me. There is nothing solemn about it. This is what gentleness is._

\--

 

Morning _Times_ propped up against a coffee cup and Vetinari is musing on the intangible nature of affection. He feels he is attempting to speak a lost language. He gropes about for words and expressions. Half of them are in Klatchian but that will not do. He is not Madam, he has no wish to see himself through another language.

His thoughts deviate, he wonders which memory Downey had been thinking of when he chose the restaurant from the other night. Was it the one from when Vetinari was about to slip out of the city to avoid Snapcase’s ever-increasing obsession with collecting the heads of assassins?

He had been young and had said, ‘meet me in Klatch. We’ll visit Ludo’ and Downey had smiled and said ‘sure’ which was a lie. Downey’s parents could afford a beautiful education for their son but Tours abroad? Not quite within their budget. They were both aware of this.

Then there was the dinner at a Klatchian curry stand when he returned from the Tour and Downey had asked, ‘as good as it was in Klatch?’ and Vetinari had said, ‘you know, it’s not bad.’ He had wanted to say something then but didn’t know how and Downey was chattering on about something or other and then the tides of their lives turned.

The third time of significant remembrance was the dinner he had while Snapcase was being inhumed. Granted, Downey wasn’t there for that one.

‘Do you still do crosswords?’

Vetinari looks up and finds Downey leaning against the window.

‘You’re lucky I knew it was you.’

‘I am. But I knew you’d know. It works out. I’ve come to drop off the tax papers. Bursar says that you’ve given her an ulcer.’

‘I’m sure she can find a doctor.’

A folder is dropped onto his desk as Downey lands himself in a chair.

‘Well?’

Vetinari blinks at him. Downey mimes something. Vetinari’s eyes narrow.

‘Crosswords,’ Downey clarifies.

‘Oh yes, of course.’

‘I remember you used to buy little books of them. I tried a few, never got the hang of it.’

‘It’s how you think. Crossword thought patterns are very particular but you can learn them. They’re like another language.’

Downey looks uninterested in the prospect of learning how to do crosswords. Vetinari persists, ‘it is like a math formula. Once you figure it out you can apply it as you see fit.’

Downey makes a face, ‘I see what you’re doing. This isn’t like your logic books. Those were fine, they are like formulas. And music is mathematical. I don’t believe you with crosswords. Besides, too many colours.’

‘Too many colours?’

‘Too many colours.’

Downey does not elaborate. ‘Well,’ he stretches and pushes himself upward, out of the chair. ‘You have your money. I’m sure the city infrastructure will thank me.’

‘I might have that pot-hole outside the Guild fixed. The one you’ve complained to me about for the past year and a half.’

‘You’re a devious bastard.’

A flicker of a smile. This is becoming ridiculous.

‘Downey.’

The man turns from where he had retreated to the window to leave.

‘I have a proposition to make.’

‘Is this about taxes or tea, curry and gin?’

‘The latter.’

‘Oh good. I thought I was going mad.’

Downey returns to his usual chair but doesn’t lounge. He sits with nervous energy. Vetinari realizes that it has been years since he has seen Downey nervous. When he became Patrician, he was. When he offered him a Lordship he was. They have known each other for over forty years. He feels adrift in it.

Vetinari outlines his thoughts.

Downey is unresponsive for the entirety of the outline which is more nerve-wracking than he thought it would be. It is the dark eyes-white hair combination, inverse of his own dark hair-light eyes. Both uncanny in their own manner. When he is finished Downey says, ‘I think I understood that’ and Vetinari says, ‘I can provide a translation if you’d like’ and Downey is amused and says, ‘I don’t think there’s a mathematical formula for this’ and Vetinari says, ‘no’ then stands, leans over, and kisses him.

 

\--

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Roland Barthes' 'A Lovers' Discourse', Trish Salah's 'Wanting in Arabic', T.S. Eliot's 'Wasteland', Rosmarie Waldrop's 'The Reproduction of Profiles', and the letters of Abelard and Heloise.


End file.
